Aside from, perhaps, GMOs, few topics in the sustainable business arena are as emotional as pets. When my friend Erik Assadourian wrote a well-researched story for the Guardian last year asking whether pets are bad for the environment, he was assailed in the comments as a a “dumbass,” an “animal hater” and “an overpaid media commentator.” (The last allegation, I can assure you, is false.) It goes without saying that people love their pets. “My dogs are my family,” one commenter said. And we certainly can’t blame pets for the world’s pollution problems. As Wayne Pacelle, the president of the Humane Society of the United States, a pet owner and a defender of all four-legged creatures, once said, dogs and cats “aren’t driving to work.”

True enough. But dogs and cats have environmental impacts. They make waste. They’re eat, and many are overfed. They consume resources, including plastic toys and costly health care. And while, yes, they provide companionship, improve health and get us to spend more time outdoors meeting people, as Erik noted, couldn’t all those things be provided just as well by, er, people? Do we really need dogs to get us to talk a walk around the neighborhood.

When I recently revisited the topic for the Guardian, focusing this time on the impact of pet food, an editor told me that my story wasn’t good enough to run. I learned long ago not to argue with editors–they’re powerful and, occasionally, right–so I took the story to the Worldwatch Institute, where Erik works, and it then made its way to GreenBiz.

The story is anything but an assault on pets. Instead, it’s an effort to show how the giant food company Mars, which makes more pet food than candy bars, is trying to reduce its environmental impact, focusing on cat food, seafood and the oceans. Here’s how the story begins:

The United States is home to 85.8 million cats and 77.8 million dogs. They all have to eat. And that’s a problem — particularly when owners decide to feed their pets as if they were people.

The environmental impact of pet food is big, although no one knows just how big. Like the rest of us, dogs and cats consume meat, fish, corn and wheat, thus creating pressures on the global food system, along with carbon emissions as the food is manufactured and transported.

What we do know is that pet food is big business, generating about $22 billion in sales a year, industry groups estimate.

Much could be done to “green” pet foods — dogs and cats are getting more meat and fish than they need, for starters — but the industry is just starting to grapple with its sustainability issues.

Privately held Mars is leading the way, at least when compared to its big rivals. Better known for chocolate bars and M&Ms, Mars is the world’s biggest pet food company: Mars Pet Care has revenues estimated at $17 billion, employs 39,000 people, operates about 70 factories and owns the Pedigree, Whiskas, Nutro, Sheba, Cesar, Royal Canin and Iams brands.

The story goes on to say that Mars has

promised to buy fish only from fisheries or fish farms that are certified as sustainable by third parties. Importantly, Mars also said it would replace all wild catch whole fish and fish fillet with either by-products or farmed fish — so that demand for pet food does not compete directly with food that could be served to people.

That’s a step in the right direction. Other pet food companies, including Nestle and J.M. Smucker, have yet to follow. You can read the rest of my story here.

There was more bad news this week for pet owners. Did you happen to see the massive New York Times series about slavery at sea? The headline reads Sea Slaves: The Human Misery that Feeds Pets and Livestock. In four long stories, The Times reports on harsh, inhumane, just plain awful way that people are treated in the Thai fishing industry, which is being driven by “an insatiable global demand for seafood even as fishing stocks are depleted.”

Here’s where pets come in:

The United States is the biggest customer of Thai fish, and pet food is among the fastest growing exports from Thailand, more than doubling since 2009 and last year totaling more than $190 million. The average pet cat in the United States eats 30 pounds of fish per year, about double that of a typical American.

Though there is growing pressure from Americans and other Western consumers for more accountability in seafood companies’ supply chains to ensure against illegal fishing and contaminated or counterfeit fish, virtually no attention has focused on the labor that supplies the seafood that people eat, much less the fish that is fed to animals.

“How fast do their pets eat what’s put in front of them, and are there whole meat chunks in that meal?” asked Giovanni M. Turchini, an environmental professor at Deakin University in Australia who studies the global fish markets. “These are the factors that pet owners most focus on.”

So should you give up your cats and dogs? Not necessarily. But small pets are better than big ones. And if you feed them fish and meat, you might want to go vegetarian more often, to offset their impact.

Despite all of the sound and fury set off by the campaign to divest fossil fuels — and there has been plenty — Bill McKibben, 350.org and their allies have persuaded only a handful of big institutions to sell off the coal, oil and gas holdings in their endowments. They’ve had little or no direct effect on publicly-traded oil companies like Chevron and ExxonMobil, and none on the government-owned oil companies of Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Iran and Iraq that are shielded from chants of rag-tag college students telling them to “leave it in the ground.”

That said, by any measure other than financial, the divestment campaign has been a big success.

Nestled in Vermont’s bucolic Champlain valley, Middlebury College is a seedbed of environmental activism. Middlebury students started 350.org, the environmental organization that is fighting climate change and coordinating the global campaign for fossil-fuel divestment. Bill McKibben, the writer and environmentalist who is spearheading the campaign, has taught there since 2001. Yet Middlebury has declined to sell the oil, gas, and coal company holdings in its $1 billion endowment.

McKibben’s alma mater, Harvard University — which has a $36 billion endowment, the largest of any university — also has decided not to divest its holdings in fossil fuel companies. Indeed, virtually all of the United States’ wealthiest universities, foundations, and public pension funds have resisted pressures to sell their stakes in fossil fuel companies. And while a handful of big institutional investors — Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, Stanford University, and AXA, a French insurance company — have pledged to sell some of their coal investments, coal companies account for less than 1 percent of the value of publicly traded stocks and an even smaller sliver of endowments.

Put simply, the divestment movement is not even a blip on the world’s capital markets.

Why? Well, you can read the rest of the story to find out, but in essence, the divestment campaign has in short order built a vibrant global climate movement, which is exactly what McKibben and his allies set out to do nearly three years ago. (See Do the Math: Bill McKibben takes on big oil, my 2012 interview with him.) Hundreds of US college campuses, cities and foundations have been forced to respond to divestment demands. They’ve debated and analyzed the climate threat. And, as the story explains, even when institutions decide not to divest — often for good reason, I might add — they almost always do something. What’s more, the campaign has spread wildly, er, widely to Europe and Asia, thanks to social media, and it has taken on a life of its own, as a decentralized but loosely connected series of campaigns that are gathering momentum.

As a practical matter, divestment has re-opened an important conversation about whether and how institutions and individuals are investing with their values in mind. Last week, writing on my other blog, Nonprofit Chronicles, I asked: Why won’t foundations divest fossil fuels? Most of the big ones have not, but they are all talking about “impact investing,” that is, aligning more of their endowment money with their programming goals. Some of that money is flowing to climate solutions including renewable energy and energy efficiency projects.And it would not surprise me to see one or two big foundations–Bloomberg Philanthropies, maybe?–decide to divest.

]]>http://www.marcgunther.com/the-fossil-fuel-divestment-movement-is-failing-except-its-not/feed/0We’re losing the climate battle. So we may need to harvest CO2 from the sky.http://www.marcgunther.com/suck-it-up-we-may-need-to-harvest-co2-from-the-sky-to-avoid-catastrophic-global-warming/
http://www.marcgunther.com/suck-it-up-we-may-need-to-harvest-co2-from-the-sky-to-avoid-catastrophic-global-warming/#commentsWed, 15 Jul 2015 19:11:34 +0000http://www.marcgunther.com/?p=15811

In Squamish, British Columbia, a Canadian town halfway between Vancouver and Whistler where the ocean meets the mountains, a startup led by Harvard physicist David Keith – and funded in part by Bill Gates – is building an industrial plant to capture carbon dioxide from the air.

Carbon Engineering aims to eventually build enough plants to suck many millions of tons of CO2 out of the air to reduce climate change. Its technology could help capture dispersed emissions – that is, emissions from cars, trucks, ships, planes or farm equipment – or even to roll back atmospheric concentrations of CO2.

The Calgary-based company is one of a crop of startups placing bold bets on technology designed to directly capture CO2 from the air. Lately, at least three have shown signs of progress. New York City-based Global Thermostat, which is led by CEO Graciela Chichilnisky and Peter Eisenberger, a Columbia University professor and former researcher for Exxon and Bell Labs, tells me it has recently received an infusion of capital from an as-yet-unnamed US energy company. As part of a demonstration project financed by Audi, Swiss-based Climeworks in April captured CO2 from the air and supplied it to a German firm called Sunfire, which then recycled it into a zero-carbon diesel fuel.

These companies are a long, long way from success, it must be said. Deploying direct air capture at a scale sufficient to make a difference to the climate would be a vast and costly undertaking. But their work matters because of the increasing likelihood that we will need to deploy “negative emissions” technologies like direct-air capture to avoid pushing through the 2 degrees of global warming that governments have agreed is a safe upper limit. This isn’t as well understood as it should be, in my view.

Climate science is ridiculously complicated and, as a non-scientist, I’ve struggled to make sense of the conflicting claims about how dire our situation is likely to become. Some people tell me that environmentalists and climate scientists are alarmists, exaggerating the dangers we face and squelching dissent. Matt Ridley, a writer whose work I admire, makes that argument in this excellent, in-depth podcast. Others say just the opposite, that scientists and economists feel pressure to underplay the seriousness of the problem, for fear of leading people to despair and inaction. Oliver Geden, head of research at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, made this argument recently in the journal Nature, writing: “The climate policy mantra – that time is running out for 2C but we can still make it if we act now – is scientific nonsense.” Esquire magazine, of all places, published a long and powerful story last week under this headline:

When the End of Human Civilization Is Your Day Job

Among many climate scientists, gloom has set in. Things are worse than we think, but they can’t really talk about it.

The obvious truth about global warming is this: barring miracles, humanity is in for some awful shit.

The fundamental problem is that the world’s biggest GHG emitters — China, the US, Germany, the UK and India — are unlikely to stop burning fossil fuels anytime soon for a whole bunch of reasons, including, in the case of India, the fact that hundreds of millions of its poor people don’t have access to electricity. As Roberts puts it:

Holding temperature down under 2°C — the widely agreed upon target — would require an utterly unprecedented level of global mobilization and coordination, sustained over decades. There’s no sign of that happening, or reason to think it’s plausible anytime soon.

No matter what happens this winter in Paris.

Last year, in a report that deserved more attention than it got, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said that avoiding the goal of 2 °C of global warming will likely require the global deployment of technologies to remove carbon dioxide from the air.(For more about the need for carbon removal, here’s a good story from Brad Plumer at Vox.) Such technologies don’t exist today, at meaningful scale.

Silly me. I thought the world’s cocoa farmers, most of whom are poor, would surely benefit when global chocolate companies, including Hershey’s, Mars and Nestle, made major commitments to buy certified cocoa. Hershey’s and Mars pledged to certify 100 percent of their cocoa as sustainably produced by 2020, while Nestle has made a variety of commitments to certification.

It’s more complicated than that, as I should have known. It always is, isn’t it? I learned a little more about cocoa farmers and certification while reporting a story for Guardian Sustainable Business about Hershey’s.

The top of the story, unfortunately, was inadvertently mangled a bit in the editing process (it happens, but rarely) and so while you are free to read it as published in the Guardian, I’m going to post an earlier version here, and I’ll add a comment at the end. Here’s the story:

* * *

Three years ago, following a campaign by activist groups, the Hershey Company announced that it would use 100% certified cocoa in its chocolate products by 2020. The activists, including the International Labor Rights Forum, Green America and Global Exchange, declared victory, albeit with reservations.

Since then, things have grown complicated. Hershey’s is making progress in its sustainable sourcing: the company says that, in 2014, 30% of its cocoa came from certified, sustainable sources. It expects to hit 50% in 2016, a full year ahead of schedule. “This has become a way of doing business in the future,” J.P. Bilbrey, Hershey’s chief executive, told Guardian Sustainable Business.

When Hershey’s made its commitment, some in the industry feared that there would not be enough certified cocoa to satisfy Hershey’s, Mars, Ferrero and other sustainability-minded companies. But, as Bilbrey says, “Capitalism is a wonderful thing. If you demand something, those that supply it to you will provide that particular product.”

What’s less clear is how much of a difference this sustainable sourcing is making in the lives of cocoa farmers. Hershey’s, which had revenues of $7.4bn last year, won’t say how much of its profits have trickled down to suppliers, nor will it say how much business it does with each of its three nonprofit certifiers – Fair Trade, Rainforest Alliance and UTZ Certified. However, the chocolate maker – as well as its certifiers and the activists who pushed it to source certified cocoa – all agree that certification alone isn’t enough to lift the incomes of cocoa farmers.

And that hits at the heart of long-term sustainability. If those incomes don’t rise, there’s a very real risk that the next generation of farmers will give up on the business. “Even with the highest premium paid (for certified cocoa), farmers are way deep in poverty,” says Judy Gearhart, executive director of the International Labor Rights Forum.

Han De Groot, executivee director of UTZ Certified, a nonprofit based in Amsterdam, agrees. After visiting certified cocoa farmers in Cote D’Ivoire, he wrote: “There is still too much poverty to have a decent and sustainable life.”

Hershey’s efforts go beyond certification

Certification is only part of Hershey’s efforts. It also works with several partners, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, US AID, and Cocoa Action, to support efforts designed to help farmers and their families in West Africa. Its projects include Learn to Grow, a program that trains farmers on best agricultural, business and environmental practices, and CocoaLink, which distributes low-cost mobile phones to farmers. Last month, it announced plans to distribute Vivi, a nutritious peanut-based supplement, to poor school children in Ghana.

For now, the Ghanaian nutrition program is charity, but it could evolve into a business, Bilbrey said. “We’re going to experiment with this, and if turns out to be a good idea, where the kids can get some basic nutrition, as part of their lunch program, we’ll look to expand it.”

But, while they’re charitably-minded, these efforts also have a business impact: they’re all aimed at securing a long-term supply of cocoa. “We want to take cocoa farming from being a way for farmers to subsist to being an attractive vocation for the next generation,” says Leigh Horner, vice president for corporate communications and social responsibility at Hershey’s.

The trouble is, cocoa farming in West Africa – where more than 60% of the world’s cocoa is grown – is a difficult business. Most farmers work on small farms that have old trees farm practices that have not been modernized. According to Cocoa Barometer 2015, a report by a group of nonprofits, they struggle with low and fluctuating cocoa prices, a lack of farmer organization, insufficient infrastructure, uncertain land tenure and a lack of market power.

All of this translates into low wages and very hard work. According to The Fairness Gap, a detailed report published last December by the International Labor Rights Forum, the average farmer with two hectares of land makes about $755 per year in Cote d’Ivoire and $983 per year in Ghana; this translates to $2.07 per day and $2.69 per day, respectively,.

The report says:

Despite myriad projects aimed at improving education, increasing productivity, and implementing cocoa certification, the collective impact has been limited and the industry has been unable to solve the root cause of the problem: the very low prices paid to farmers.

Does certified cocoa guarantee prices to farmers? Often no.

Part of the problem may be the fluctuating market floor. Only one of Hershey’s certifiers – Fair Trade USA – actually guarantees a minimum price to cocoa growers. It requires that a $200/metric ton premium, which is about 10% above the market price, be paid to farmers.

“We believe that a meaningful level of investment, channeled directly to farmers, is needed in order to make meaningful change,” says Elan Emanuel, senior manager of cocoa supply for Fair Trade USA. He acknowledges, however, that competing with other certifiers “can be a challenge for Fair Trade – it can be a tougher sell to explain to brands why it’s important to pay a fixed premium.”

UTZ Certified and Rainforest Alliance, both of which certify more cocoa globally than Fair Trade, don’t guarantee a premium but they say that their certified cocoa sells at higher prices because of the growing demand for certified crop. What’s more, they say, their training programs for farmers lead to higher yields and better quality cocoa, which delivers more income to farmers.

A independent study of cocoa farmers in Cote D’Ivoire commissioned by the Rainforest Alliance found that the net income – defined as a farmer’s revenue from cocoa sales, minus the costs of income – was significantly higher on cocoa farms certified by the RA. Certified farms, in fact, received $403 USD per hectare – almost four times the $113 USD commanded by non-certified farms. Training in best agricultural practices accounted for most of the difference, the study said.

UTZ Certified’s Han de Groot has argued that guaranteeing cocoa farmers a premium distorts the market by because it removes the incentive for them to adopt better agricultural practices. “If we want to bring good practices to scale, the market is an important pulling force,” he has said. “Using a minimum price is not helping that practice to grow.”

But, regardless of whether or companies use minimum pricing, there seems to be considerable evidence supporting the benefits of certification. The most comprehensive review of certification was done by the global consulting firm KPMG in 2012 for the International Cocoa Organization. KMPG found that there are “more advantages than disadvantages of certification at farm, cooperative and also at community level,” but cautioned that “there is insufficient independent literature focusing on the impact of cocoa certification.”

Put simply, we really don’t know whether certification – or the other farmer aid programs launched by Hershey’s and the rest of the industry – are doing enough to improve the lives of farmers and make cocoa farming an attractive way to earn a living, in the long term.

There’s no doubt that Hershey’s is trying. But trying isn’t the same as succeeding.

* * *

I’m going to have to revisit this topic because, as I said, there’s a lot of complexity to it. But here’s a final thought. I emailed Joe Whinney, the ceo of a wonderful company called Theo Chocolate (my story about them is here), to ask how much they pay farmers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where they source cocoa. Joe replied:

As of yesterday the New York price for cocoa was $3,286 / metric ton.

Our current price paid FOB for Congo beans is $4,050 and FOB for Peru is $3,950. The farmer receives approximately 60-85% of this FOB price based on a variety of circumstances including but not limited to how much post-harvest process the farmer does, cost to deliver the cocoa to port and any special training services provided to the farmer that are not funded by outside parties.

So Theo is pay way, way more than even Fair Trade, and making sure that more of the money flows through to the farmer. Of course, a Theo chocolate bar costs a lot more than a Hershey bar, so the comparison isn’t exactly fair. But maybe the lesson is that we all need to pay more for chocolate if we want to deliver a decent livelihood to the cocao farmers at the distant end of the supply chain.

Last summer, the big PR company Edelman faced a problem that no amount of spin could resolve. Kert Davies, the former head of research for Greenpeace who now leads the Climate Investigations Center, had surveyed big public relations companies to see where they stood on the issue of climate change.

Since then, an insider told me, “a struggle for the soul” of Edelman as been unfolding inside the firm,which has more than 5,500 employees and reported worldwide revenues of $768m in FY2014. Some of those employees work for fossil-fuel clients who oppose efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions and want to extract as much oil and gas from the ground as they can. Others work for companies like Unilever, Starbucks and The North Face that have lobbied for meaningful climate regulation.

Yesterday, I revisited the story and reported in the Guardian that Edelman has lost four valued staff members, all of them leaders of Edelman’s “Business and Social Purpose Practice,” and two influential clients, the We Mean Business coalition and Nike, at least in part because of its refusal to take a stand on climate change.

Does this mean that the fossil-fuel crowd inside Edelman has won? It sure looks that way, but it’s hard to know. Edelman executives declined to be interviewed for my story. No one was willing to explain what the climate position means if, indeed, it means anything at all.

As a reporter, I’ve dealt with the Edelman firm for more than a decade; my relationships with people there have been excellent, until this climate issue came along. Shortly after I was laid off by FORTUNE in 2008, I did some writing and consulting for Edelman. I soon learned I wasn’t cut out for PR, but again, my experience with the firm was good. Call me naive, but I thought Edelman was a different kind of PR firm.

Now I can’t help but conclude that they are no different from their peers, as yesterday’s story indicates:

Some clues about where Edelman is headed can be gleaned from a new set of values and a statement of purpose published last month. The statement makes explicit the company’s willingness to work on both sides of controversial issues, including climate change:

We believe that independently held, opposing views deserve to be heard in the court of public opinion and we assert our role as a firm to being advocates for our clients.

Doing so doesn’t condone every action every client takes or imply implicit support for every position a client may adopt, but does reflect our absolute commitment and support of their right to exercise their freedom of expression.

It also grants each employee the “right to elect not to work on a piece of business that does not align with his or her personal beliefs.”

In a recent video to employees about the new statement of purpose, Matt Harrington, Edelman’s global chief operating officer, said simply: “We exist to be advocates for our clients.”

Which is OK, I guess, and wouldn’t even be a story if Edelman hadn’t tried to have it both ways on climate.

The upshot is that Edelman has lost some talented people and a couple of clients.

We’ll never know what would have happened had the company taken a different path. Instead of mumbo-jumbo about how “marketing communications” has to become “communications marketing,” Edelman could have adopted a bold, values-based position on climate change. It could have worked with its more forward-thinking fossil-fuel clients, like Shell, to bring them along on the issue. It could have positioned itself as the go-to PR shop for companies and NGOs that take sustainability seriously.

I was introduced to a set of ideas known as “ecomodernism” back in 2009, when I read Stewart Brand’s book, Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto. Stewart, the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, argued that cities are “greener” than the countryside, that low-carbon nuclear power will be need to curb climate change and that genetically-modified crops allow farmers to grow more crops on less land, thus preserving nature.

Ecomodernist ideas have gathered steam since then, driven in large part by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Norhaus, the founders of The Breakthrough Institute. Recently, Michael and Ted herded together a group of scientists and economists — including Stewart, David Keith, Mark Lynas and Roger Pielke Jr. — to publish An Ecomodernist Manifesto. They write:

Intensifying many human activities — particularly farming, energy extraction, forestry, and settlement — so that they use less land and interfere less with the natural world is the key to decoupling human development from environmental impacts. These socioeconomic and technological processes are central to economic modernization and environmental protection. Together they allow people to mitigate climate change, to spare nature, and to alleviate global poverty.

In mid-June, I had the opportunity to moderate a panel at the Breakthrough Dialogues, a conference in Sausalito where many of the authors of the Ecomodernist Manifesto spoke. I’m increasingly persuaded that their arguments make more sense than the low-tech, anti-nuclear, anti-GMO, all “natural,” small-is-beautiful, local-beats-global approach to environmental issues pushed by the most traditional environmentalists. And even those green groups that are market-friendly, technology-friendly and science-friendly hesitate to stand up in favor of nuclear energy or GMOs.

Futurist and author Ramez Naam is an optimist, even when it comes to the problem of climate change, and for good reason.

His personal history is all about progress. Naam’s father, a physician, grew up impoverished in Egypt; three of his siblings died as infants. He emigrated to the US and spent a decade working in rural Illinois, where doctors were in short supply, to obtain permanent residency status and raise his children as Americans.“When people ask me, what was the most important thing to shape my life, that was it,” Naam says. Naam, 42, grew up to become a computer scientist and executive at Microsoft, an inventor, and an award-winning author of science fiction books.

As a student of world history, Naam has seen how humanity has flourished in the last century. People live longer and suffer less than before. Doom-and-gloom predictions have not just been proven wrong, but spectacularly wrong. Take food: some forecast that the world would starve by the 1970s. While population has doubled since then, the food supply has grown by two-and-half times, and today there are more obese people than malnourished people in the world.

“This is the best of times,” Naam writes in his 2013 nonfiction book, The Infinite Resource: The Power of Ideas on a Finite Planet. “We live in a period of health, wealth and freedom never seen before.”

Natural resources – notably the atmosphere’s capacity to absorb greenhouse gases – may be limited, Naam argues, but ideas and innovation are not.

The story goes on to talk about why, when it comes to climate change, the most important idea is a carbon tax, coupled with investment in energy R&D. You can read the rest of the story here. I’d also encourage you to read the Ecomodernist Manifesto.

I’m just back from a wonderful vacation in Italy, and spending this week at the Sustainable Brands conference in San Diego. To my surprise, I see that I haven’t posted here in more than a month. Lately, I’ve been writing more for my Nonprofit Chronicles blog, about how nonprofits and foundations can become more effective. If you’re interested, please subscribe to the blog or “like” my Facebook page, which is devoted to the world of NGOs. I’m hoping to play a small role in the growing Effective Altruism movement, which aims to “do good better.”

Meantime, Guardian Sustainable Business published two of my business stories in May. The first story profiles an impressive investment firm called Huntington Capital which aims to invest in companies that create good jobs in places that need them. Here’s how it begins:

At the heart of the American Dream – the idea that anyone in the US, by dint of hard work and determination, can climb the economic ladder – is the American dream job. This is, the kind of job that can become a career, the sort of work that provides employees with decent wages, benefits, training and opportunities to better themselves. It’s the type of job that underlays a thriving economy.

It’s the type of job that San Diego-based investment firm Huntington Capital is trying to encourage companies to create.

On the surface, Huntington looks like a fairly standard fund company. It manages three funds that have a total combined investment of about $210m, most of which comes from pension funds, banks, insurance companies, foundations and wealthy families. Huntington, in turn, has invested this money in about 50 companies since its launch in 2001.

…What sets Huntington apart is its commitment to have – in its words – “a positive impact on underserved businesses and their communities”. The company calls itself an impact investor, meaning that it aims to generate returns that are social or environmental, as well as financial. Rather than focusing on Silicon Valley startups, a fairly well-worn investment landscape, it helps finance established, small and medium-sized companies in California and the southwestern US. Most of its target companies sell goods and services to other businesses, like air filtration products, janitorial work and enterprise software.

I learned about Huntington after reading “Managing vs. Measuring Impact Investment,” an excellent story in the Stanford Social Innovation Review, by Morgan Simon, who co-leads Pi Investments, which invests in Huntington. She makes an important point–that creating jobs is not nearly as important as what kinds of jobs are created. Indeed, she goes so far as to argue that companies that create low-wage, no-benefit jobs actually make poverty worse because

“job creation” is a slippery concept: Outside of true innovation and demand generation, we can’t do much more than move jobs from one zip code to another. And even when jobs are created in a low-income community, if they are low paying, then by definition they are precisely what keep those communities locked into cycles of poverty.

How does that work? In general, we don’t just have a national unemployment problem; we have an employment problem, where more than two-thirds of children in poverty live in households where one or both parents work. The vast majority of these households are led by people of color, notably African Americans and Latinos who are twice as likely to be working poor.

…Rather than counting jobs, we were interested in the migration of low-quality jobs to high-quality jobs.

Nearly 20 years after retailers like Gap, Nike and Levi Strauss agreed to take a modicum of responsibility for the health and well-being of the workers who make their apparel and shoes around the world, progress has been made. How much? That’s what I wanted to talk to Kindley Walsh Lawlor, vice president of global sustainability at Gap, about when I went to see here some time ago.

Those companies have made a serious and persistent effort to eliminate child labor and abusive practices in the factories where their clothes are made, most agree. And the young women who work in garment factories are thought to be better off than those who work in agriculture or the informal company; otherwise, they might well have stayed in their villages. But garment workers remain low paid–just a few dollars a day, depending om which poor country we are talking about. A 2013 study found that wages for workers in most garment-exporting countries actually declined between 2001 and 2011. Competitive pressures to keep costs low are intense.

Lawlor’s one of the most respected corporate-responsibility executives in the industry. My story about her ran today in Guardian Sustainable Business. Here’s how it begins:

Gap Inc, the parent company of Gap, Banana Republic and Old Navy, sells about $16bn worth of clothing a year. Most of it is made by in Asia, by roughly 1 million workers in approximately 900 factories in China, India, Vietnam, Cambodia, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Indonesia.

The daunting job of protecting their human rights belongs to Kindley Walsh Lawlor, the company’s vice president of global sustainability. Lawlor is the point person when a crisis hits factories where Gap clothes are made.

In 2010, 29 people died and more than 100 were injured when fire swept through a factory in Dhaka, Bangladesh, that supplied Gap, among others. In 2013, a labor rights group charged that a Gap supplier, also in Bangladesh, forced workers to toil for more than 100 hours a week, kept two sets of books to cheat them of their pay and fired women who became pregnant. And two years ago, when the Rana Plaza complex collapsed, the spotlight again trained on global retailers – including those, like Gap, that didn’t have any contracts with factories there – and their supply chains.

It’s been 45 years since the first Earth Day, and, as I was reminded when reading this brief history, some 20 million Americans — one in 10 of us — participated on April 22, 1970. That took organizing. And it delivered results: the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, laws regulating the disposal of hazardous waste and the quality of drinking water, and the Toxic Substances Control Act, regulating chemicals in food, drugs and cosmetics. Such was the power of the environmental movement.

I’m inclined to think that environmentalists today ought to devote more of our money and time towards building or rebuilding that movement. Some–Bill McKibben, 350.org, the Sierra Club, Greenpeace–are trying to do so, but other, big, well-funded organizations continue to play the “inside” game, working to persuade elites–federal, state and local officials, corporate executives, investors–to change. Success will require both grass-roots power and policy change, to be sure, but without a more powerful movement, “inside” strategies aren’t going to get us where we need to go.

Last week in The Guardian, I wrote about the Carbon Asset Risk initiative, a campaign coordinated by Ceres and Carbon Tracker, with support from the Global Investor Coalition. To succeed, this campaign will require action by the SEC, investors and the boards of directors and executives of oil companies who, if all goes according to plan, will shift their capital outlays into low-carbon energy.

Can fossil fuel companies be transformed into allies in the fight against climate change?

As unlikely as it might seem, a coalition of environmental groups and investors is trying to persuade coal, oil and gas companies to turn away from carbon-polluting sources of energy and invest in low-carbon alternatives.

The campaign aims to get fossil fuel companies first to disclose the risks created by their dependence on carbon-intensive assets, and then, as Ceres puts it, “ensure they are using shareholder capital prudently” in a world that takes “the economic threat of climate change seriously.” Not today’s world, needless to say, but a world that the groups fervently hope will arrive in the not too distant future.

I dearly hope to be proven wrong but, much as I admire the people at Ceres, my gut reaction to this strategy is….are you kidding me?

As The Guardian reported last week, BP (“Beyond Petroleum”) invested billions of dollars in clean and low-carbon energy in the 1980s and 1990s “but later abandoned meaningful efforts to move away from fossil fuels.”

Now Ceres wants the SEC and Wall Street to persuade BP to invest in clean energy. Again.

That’s what makes this book both inspiring and puzzling–the realization that so many different things can be done, at a relatively low cost, to help poor women climb out of poverty, without knowing which of those tools will work best.

I wrote about Betsy’s book for Guardian Sustainable Business. Here’s how my story begins:

About 600 million people in sub-Saharan Africa lack access to electricity. Solar panels might help, but rural people don’t often have the cash to buy them, or the ability to access bank loans.

Azuri Technologies, a UK-based firm that does business in 10 African nations, thinks that it might have the answer. It charges customers a one-time installation fee and then lets them use their mobile phones to make regular payments that – it claims – are less than what they now spend for kerosene or phone charging. In return, customers get eight hours of lighting a day and the ability to charge their phones. If all goes well, they own the system in about 18 months.

There’s nothing revolutionary about this business model: cash-strapped US shoppers have been buying on the layaway plan since the Great Depression. But pay-as-you-go solar lighting in Africa is a new twist, made possible by the declining costs of photovoltaic panels, the spread of cheap mobile phones, ubiquitous connectivity and cloud computing.

“This is integrating microcredit, mobile money and the solar panel,” Teutsch says. “If it brings you lights, if it brings you cell phone charging, if it brings you radio and if you get rid of kerosene, it’s transformative.”

Her book presents an array of similar tools that, according to Teutsch, have enormous potential to prevent disease, deliver clean energy, lift incomes and promote human rights. They range from simple and time-tested technologies like breastfeeding, hand-washing, bikes and vaccines to high-tech innovations like Solar Ear, a low-cost hearing aid powered by solar-charged batteries, and Inesfly, an insecticide-infused paint that protects against the blood-sucking vinchuca beetle, which spreads Chagas disease.

I go on to say, however, that

a problem with the 100-under-$100 model is that we don’t know as much as we should about how to alleviate poverty and empower women.

Microfinance, malaria nets and clean cookstoves are among Teutsch’s favored tools. Yet microfinance has suffered a series of setbacks in India and Bangladesh, and now there’s spirited debate among economists about whether it leads to gains in income, consumption or education. While mosquito nets clearly help stop the spread of malaria, many are used for fishing – and perhaps overfishing. And while clean cookstoves undoubtedly reduce indoor air pollution and save fuel, field studies indicate that underprivileged women have not embraced them. A reporter for Nature who spent months in India found that they often sit unused in corners, broken or simply abandoned.

If any of you are reading my other blog, Nonprofit Chronicles–and I do hope you will check it out, and subscribe–you’ll know that this is a current obsession of mine: Many nonprofit groups do a poor job, or make no effort at all, to measure their impact. So it’s difficult to donors, whether they be governments, foundations or individuals, to know how to be spent their charitable dollars.